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Joe Dressner, Wine Importer, Dies at 60

Joe Dressner, an importer whose advocacy of Old World wines made without chemicals or manipulation inspired a sort of natural wine avant-garde, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60.

The cause was brain cancer, his son, Jules, said.

Mr. Dressner’s Manhattan-based company, Louis/Dressner Selections, which he formed in 1988 with his wife, Denyse Louis, specialized in wines from France and Italy that he variously termed real, natural, authentic or heirloom.

In an era when most wines are made with grapes grown in chemically farmed vineyards and then manipulated with cultured yeasts and other chemicals and enzymes, Mr. Dressner championed wines that were expressions of local cultures, made from grapes grown organically or in rough approximation to it. In the cellar, nothing was added or taken away. The winemaker simply shepherded the grape juice along its natural path through fermentation.

In the last 10 years, interest in these wines, prompted by Mr. Dressner and others, has grown tremendously. Though they make up a relatively small slice of the marketplace, the wines have had a disproportionate influence, filtering into the mainstream by way of sommeliers, writers and other importers. At the same time, they have stirred up polarizing debates about grape growing, winemaking, wine criticism and marketing.

In his pursuit of those wines, he found, often through word of mouth, extraordinary French producers like Jean-Paul Brun in Beaujolais; Marc Ollivier, Thierry Puzelat and Clos Roche Blanche in the Loire Valley; Pierre Overnoy in the Jura; Eric Texier in the Rhône; and, more recently, Radikon, Arianna Occhipinti and Alberto Tedeschi in Italy.

Though uncompromising, Mr. Dressner was by no means dogmatic. Some significant estates in his portfolio, like Didier Dagueneau of Pouilly-Fumé, adhere to methods that do not square with natural wine doctrine.

“It’s a taste and sensory preference,” he said in 2005. “It’s not being purist, or that we follow this guru or that guru, but that we feel the wines taste better.”

Photo

Joe Dressner.Credit
Nick Bumstead/Find.Eat.Drink.

Mr. Dressner always emphasized that the wines were the products of down-to-earth personalities. He often brought groups of vignerons to the United States so members of the trade and the public could make the connection between wine and people.

“It’s always been about the winemakers, how they work and their vision,” Kevin McKenna, a partner in Louis/Dressner, said in an interview. “We wanted to bring that to restaurants, distributors, retailers and to the general public. It was fundamental.”

Joseph Mathew Dressner was born in Mineola, on Long Island, on Sept. 15, 1951, and grew up in Queens. He graduated from the University of Buffalo in 1973 with a degree in American history and received a master’s degree in journalism from New York University, where he met Ms. Louis, his future wife, a student from Burgundy.

In addition to his wife and son, he is survived by their daughter, Alyce Dressner.

While he worked as a freelance journalist, Mr. Dressner would spend time each summer at a farmhouse belonging to Ms. Louis’s family in the Mâconnais region of Burgundy. While there they got the idea of importing wine from France.

At first, Jules Dressner said, they had no particular philosophy about wine. They simply sought winemakers who did not yet have an importer. But over time they learned that the wines they liked best were made from low yields of grapes, harvested by hand and fermented with indigenous yeast. Soon they developed their own sense of how wine ought to be made, marketed and consumed.

Mr. Dressner pioneered using the Internet as a tool for marketing wine, blogging and commenting on bulletin boards in a style that blended fact and absurdist fiction. “I enjoyed mixing facts and fantasy with my opinions, true stories, invented anecdotes and fictional characters,” he told the wine blogger Tom Wark in 2009.

He also gave vent to his cantankerous, contrarian personality. He countered pretension and self-importance with sarcasm, and while he baited enemies, he thought nothing of skewering those who sympathized with him, especially if they were overly earnest and lacked humor.